Search This Blog

Pages

Verdant Skies Usability Review

Verdant Skies is a life simulation which takes place in a world called Viridis Primus. Influenced by games like Harvest Moon, your character helps aid in the success of the colony in which you live by growing crops and building machines that help you manufacture new and useful materials. In addition to the focus of building and creating things to help your character survive, Verdant Skies also has quality storytelling.

I played an alpha version of the game Verdant
Skies for about 2 hours. This heuristic analysis includes my findings along with recommendations.

Key Findings/Recommendations:

·Sometimes items overlapped and this made it
difficult to select the correct item. This would often
lead to selection of the wrong item.

My watering hose was in front of a plant and therefore made
it difficult to put away. For some reason, it was not so difficult to pick up
the hose. When I would hover over the plant behind the watering hose and then
back over the hose, the plant would still be highlighted by the mouse and I
would have to drag my cursor elsewhere and then back over the hose carefully as
to not accidentally highlight the plant.

Hearthstone

Recommendation: I
would recommend highlighting the two more when they are selected. I would then
be able to more accurately differentiate the plant and the hose and be able to
better select correctly. (Hearthstone does a good job at this)

·On the map, not having labeled buildings made it
difficult to know where I was going at times.

For example, when I was told I
needed to go and meet someone at the Administration Building, I thought I
remembered which one it was on the map, but not feeling certain made this
slightly frustrating. I’ve also missed the name when entering the building. Also,
I kept confusing the red house (which is mine) for the administration building
since it’s red.

Animal Crossing

Recommendation: Label/differentiate the houses in some way so I
have more of an idea of whose house belongs to whom. This could be done by
labeling them directly with the name when the cursor hovers over the house or
having the owners face on their house. This will make it more effortless for
players when looking where they need to go. (Animal crossing does a good demonstration of this)

·When I was tasked with making boots, I thought
that I could not build any item that was grayed out.

Even though
all I had to do was select the boot icon, which was gray before I constructed
them, I thought I was not able to build the boots. I therefore left and
returned a few times before finally clicking on the gray boot icon and
constructing them.

Recommendation: The menu in the kitchen
communicates what I am able to build by highlighting items that I currently
have enough materials to construct. The other items are colored but shadowed so
this communicates that I don’t have the necessary items to construct them. This
is better than the prior menu since it minimizes confusing as to what I can
construct.

·Some of the tasks in the game were vague and I
would get stuck for a while. Some examples are shipping items and meeting the
doctor.

The task is
to ship $100 worth of items to someone. Since I’m not sure where I do this, I
wander around for a long time and explore different buildings. It’s not until I
decided to move onto something else that I happened to notice the yellow arrow
pointing to a box where I can ship items. Also, I’m not entirely sure how often
the yellow arrow shows up since I only notice it occasionally. I’m not sure if
this is because it’s not showing up very often or the lack of color contrast
isn’t usually that noticeable to me.

Recommendation: Highlight the arrow to make it stand out from the
background more than it currently does. Right now it’s not very noticeable.

·An issue I noticed in the mailing box is how to
select a certain amount of items to send rather than sending all. Of one item. For
example, I want to send only 10 pieces of lumber instead of all 20 of mine.
Since I only needed to send $100 worth of items, it felt impossible to get to
this amount without going over.

Summary:

Overall, Verdant
Skies requires some smoothing out with mechanics and clarity. I worry that
lacking these will discourage players from completing the game. Building items
gave me motivation to continue playing and was genuinely enjoyable. However,
without understanding more of the context behind goals, it is somewhat
difficult to grasp. I enjoyed this game and look forward to playing the full
experience.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Metro Nexus is a puzzle-platformer game that is both cooperative and competitive at the same time. It has an old-school arcade feel that is a homage to an old Arcade game called City Connection. Players navigate each level by their vehicle, that can jump from platform to platform and pick up and use items such as mines and life. The design of the game was inspired by transit systems from worlds major cities.

(Testing and reporting originally from Spring 2016)Fingeance, by Escape Industries, is a 4-player shoot-em-up game in which the fish (you) are trying to get back your gills that have been taken from you. The game relies heavily on a teamwork dynamic which requires strategically choosing which characters to play, as some play different roles.